Core Response #3 - Alexandria

I really appreciated the Raphael article, because much like the Gray article from last week, it highlighted how economic imperatives and constraints work to structure and inform the subject matter of television. 

I initially expected this week’s readings to be focused on the emergence of micro-celebrity and influencer culture through reality tv, but I was surprised to find really helpful theorizations of citizenship in relation to media formations and participation. According to McCarthy, reality tv is aligned with neoliberal discourses of resilience as individual in response to systemic injury. Oulette and Hay argued that voting in reality tv aligns consumer participation with political participation in terms of citizen-making. It’s really rough to see how their argument was so prescient, considering the progression of American politics over the past decade. Donald Trump is so central to this argument and perhaps the best example of this cultural process at play. Oulette writes,”While The Apprentice is not overtly about a "political process" (that is, in the narrow sense of "electoral politics"), its demonstrations of corporate accountability become, technically, interdependent with the procedures for political accountability in the United States in these times. This is not to say only that citizens are or that state government operates, like a corporation; it is to say that The Apprentice is one site (and a popular one) where public and private government intersect.” This obviously became a central part of Trump’s rhetoric and political strategy, promising to treat running the country from a “business” mindset—which, to him, represented a stark departure from stagnating, bureaucratic political processes. What occurred with Trump also can be contextualized within a long lineage of tv’s influence on the political sphere and office of the presidency that can be traced to JFK, whose appearances on TV were central to crafting his public persona and the parasocial relationships he developed with American citizens. This idea of tv functioning for the purpose of citizen-making relates to prior readings about earlier periods of tv, like the George Lipsitz reading. But reality tv (with its participatory frameworks and setting in everyday contexts outside of a studio environment) further spreads democracy “out over daily life” (214).